PAUL RICARD -
Are children a major source of contagion for COVID-19? Ten months into a pandemic that has claimed 1.2 million lives experts are still divided on the question, even as governments must decide whether to keep classrooms open or shut.
During the first wave of infection, scientific consensus formed around the concern that children might be a crucial vector — as they are for the flu — in spreading the new coronavirus.
And then, moving into the summer, the opposite idea took hold: kids, especially young ones, did not infect others that much, several studies suggested.
“If you look at the scientific literature, it’s really not very clear,” said Dominique Costagliola, an epidemiologist at the Marie and Pierre Curie Faculty of the Sorbonne University in Paris.
These apparently contradictory results have not made things any easier for policy makers struggling to balance the health of their citizens and their economies.
A number of studies showed that children, who rarely show symptoms when infected, were not highly contagious to other family members during lockdowns in the Spring.
But that was during a period when schools were shut down and the spread of the virus had slowed, noted epidemiologist Zoe Hyde, a professor at the University of Western Australia.
“Most studies of COVID-19 and children have been conducted during highly unusual lockdown periods or at a time of low community transmission,” she noted in the Medical Journal of Australia.
More recently, however, a new wave of studies from the United States,
India and South Korea have challenged the idea that kids are not that contagious.
Findings published last week from the US Centers for Disease Control based on a study of 300 people in September concluded that “transmission of SARS-CoV-2 among household members was frequent from either children or adults.”
A much larger study from Britain released on Tuesday paints a different picture.
“Living with children 0-11 years old was not associated with increased risks of recorded SARS-CoV-2 infection, COVID-19 related
hospital or ICU admission,” research from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Oxford, based on data from more than nine million adults, concluded.
For children aged 12 to 18, there was a risk, but it remained small, the study found. — AFP
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